1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an execution decision support program and device of the regulation measures to support the decision on whether to execute measures due to the regulation that limits the amount of substances that enter and exit a business entity.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been described in JP-A-Hei6 (1994)-149849 and JP-A-2004-227301 a method of managing the amount of substances that enter and exit an enterprise.
The method described in JP-A-Hei6 (1994)-149849 is a method of predicting the shipping amount of each product produced by an enterprise with a constant level of accuracy and low imbalance and managing the purchase or stocks as well as the shipping amount on the basis of the predicted result.
In JP-A-2004-227301, a method is described predicting the shipping amount for the next periods by calculating the ratio of a total shipping amount and a value obtained by subtracting an accumulated shipping amount for a product actually shipped from the total shipping amount during a contract period of the product for every unit period (for example, every month), and obtaining the pattern of the shipping amount for each and every unit period.
In recent years, environmental regulations have been reinforced in each country. As an example, each enterprise in Europe might have an obligation to register information on chemical substances contained in a product to the regulatory agency according to the restriction evaluation authorization and restriction of chemicals (REACH) rules that have been approved in Europe when the total annual import volume of chemical substances contained in a product exceeds a predetermined amount. Moreover, additional information is required whenever the total import volume exceeds a threshold, such as 1 t, 10 t, 100 t, and 1000 t, which incurs expensive measures to collect and prepare the additional information. Therefore, each enterprise in Europe needs to take into consideration of the above-mentioned environmental regulations or make a determination on whether or not to withdraw the business according to the total import volume or earning rate of the product.
The enterprise in Europe should register the chemical substances before the total annual import volume of the in-product chemical substances exceed the above-mentioned threshold to avoid violating environmental regulations, and therefore, the above-mentioned determination should be made before the total import volume has been decided. In general, earnings increase in proportion to the sales volume of product. When the product or procured goods such as parts, substances, etc. to be used for the product are imported, however, the total import volume of the in-product chemical substances also increases correspondingly, and therefore, a possibility of exceeding the above-mentioned threshold increases. For this case, it becomes impossible to sell the product that contains the chemical substances until the chemical substances are registered, which could result in the loss of sales opportunities for the product. Therefore, the trade-off between measuring the expenses against the regulations and the loss of sales opportunities is considered. As a result, determining the above-mentioned import volume is difficult to make.
The methods described in JP-A-Hei6 (1994)-149849 and JP-A-2004-227301 only describe predicting the shipping amount of a product produced by an enterprise, but nothing is described regarding measures due to regulations that limit the amount of substances that enter and exit the enterprise.